The historiography of archaeology: exploring theory, contingency and rationality

From the 1990s onwards the history of archaeology has been enjoying something of a vogue. The of the five-volume Encyclopedia of the History of Archaeology (Murray 1999, 2001) has expanded our store of biographies and national histories, the Bulletin of the History of has provided a much needed forum for research, as has the History of Archaeology Network (HARN), and the Archives of European Archaeology project has re-focused our on how much of the history of archaeology in Europe has still to be written. During the same archaeologists have continued to justify and to advocate the significance of ‘novel’ approaches archaeology through partial histories of the discipline (the most notable recent examples being associated with the revival of ‘Darwinian archaeologies’ such as Lyman, O’Brien and Dunnell 1997). Other agendas have been advanced through the production of alternative histories of national (e. g. Patterson 1995), the role of women (e. g. Diaz-Andreu and Sorrensen 1998) and of (e. g. Kehoe and Emmerichs 1999).